About the possible existence of multiple SAFE Networks

[Sotros25]

@andreruigrok

how he plans to protect the network from ‘pirates’ forking the network and walking away with it,

MaidSafe has patents in place regarding the technology upon which the SAFE Network is/will be built. However, the licenses are such that anyone can fork the code.

@nicklambert

Yep, you are welcome to fork it and create another version, James, the various open source licenses we have in place enable that.

More specifically, the MaidSafe Foundation (rather than MaidSafe the company) holds the patents. The parents are meant to prevent others from claiming rights to and therefore preventing others from using the technology.

@nicklambert

It is also worth noting that all patents have been assigned to the MaidSafe Foundation, so the Foundation is the owner and licenses the patents back to MaidSafe (the company), royalty free and in perpetuity. So the trustees of the Foundation would be involved in any such decisions. Interestingly, and as a result of assigning the patents to the Foundation, anyone trying to restrict MaidSafe (the company’s) freedom to operate by threatening litigation would need to sue a Scottish charity, something that most PR departments should be extremely concerned about.

MaidSafe leverages a combination of MIT/BSD and GPL licenses because…

@Sotros25

I think both MIT/BSD and GPL licenses are designed to facilitate sharing and to mitigate patent trolling; however, the GPL license requires that derivative works open source their code. See here for more info .

To be more specific:

@dirvine

@happybeing

@Sotros25 is spot on, the key being that companies can exploit open source without contributing anything under MIT/BSD whereas with GPL they have to share what they develop using it - and so give back.

This is what we are trying to achieve, have upper layers mit/bsd etc. and routing/vault gpl if that makes sense. The feeling is there may be issues with app devs if we force gpl there, although I would love to

Generally speaking, filed IP protections like trademarks, patents and copyrights (unlike trade secrets) can only do so much because you have to publish the “art”. That allows people to reverse engineer/engineer around a solution. Truly sustainable competitive advantages come from product quality, processes and operations.